Poetry
Love Letter to Nuclear Fusion
You’re every good piece of sci-fi’s emergency contact,
or maybe a weekend fling—
Hail Mary & cure-all for when the world-building gets fuzzy
& we won’t stop asking how exactly tomorrow gets made.
You spoil us with deluxe potential. Make our worries boil away.
How else do starships slough the chest-crushing hug of earthly gravity,
flee this solar system like June bugs through a storm-torn screen?
You promise to get us on our feet again.
Power our pacemakers.
Stitch the far side of the Moon with tower & dome.
You, our blankest of checks, but never magic—
never warp or wormhole, the looping moment the physicist pierces
their cocktail napkin with a straw & asks us to believe
in spacetime folded, a universe runneled like corduroy.
You’re just real enough to understand. H-bomb bottled & sold.
We know you’re possible (thirty years off for the last fifty)
but nearly here, so it feels like you’ve always belonged.
Reactors fuming a Cherenkov blue.
Our horizon gushing with wattage to spare.
— Connor Yeck